More great news! Lucas has announced that there will be a TV series based on Star Wars and the tentative date for release is Fall 2006. I think Fall is quarter 4. Fucking Americans and their seasons.
I haven’t seen any official announcements on theforce.net or starwars.com, but the rumour is that Kevin Smith has been asked to direct, or has been pinned to be asked. RTFA.
Last weekend was Wellington’s excuse for a pop culture expo — Armageddon.
On the up side, it was at the Queen’s Wharf Event Center. Until this year, it’s been held at the Michael Fowler center which is multi level, and very tightly packed. The Event Center is a much better venue. Still a bit small, but if the organisers had got rid of one of the Yu-gi-oh areas, there would have been more room for something interesting.
On the down side, it had too much Yu-gi-oh, the stalls were uninspiring (one stall which was from a group in Christchurch trying to make their own sci-fi TV show didn’t tell you what the stall was about at all – I only found out AFTER the expo), the local comics and local artists are complete embarrassments, the wrestling was pretty awful and very amateur, and there were NO RUBBISH BINS. Utterly astounding. There was rubbish everywhere because there wasn’t a bin to be found. I walked around with my rubbish for over an hour, didn’t find a single bin, so just threw it on the ground.
As it is every single year, it was a complete disappointment and an utter waste of money. Every year I promise myself I won’t put myself through the pain again, and every year I seem to find myself going. This time I got a free ticket, and I was interested in seeing the new venue, but I still feel ripped off.
I think I’ll put some effort into running a proper convention myself. It will take me years to organise, but this embarrassment that is Armageddon should be put out of our misery.
I’ve finally got the “original” Star Wars trilogy on DVD. As I’ve mentioned before it’s the spcieal special edition, but has some nice extra features on the bonus disc. Included is Lucas harping on about how he’s now able to make the films that he couldn’t afford to make originally.
I doubt budgetary restraints had anything to do with Han Solo shooting Greedo first.
But Lucas maintains that he wishes the “original” trilogy vanquished from the face of the planet, and that only the new special special editions should be distributed.
He doesn’t care about the fans, but cares about the bottom dollar affected by piracy. Guess what? I’ll say it loud and clear:
GEORGE, YOU ARE ENCOURAGING PIRACY BY NOT GIVING THE FANS WHAT THEY WANT — THAT IS, THE ORIGINAL UNRAPED EDITION.
We want Han to be a tough scoundrel who shoots first. We want the non-CGI flash bang explosion of the ships and the Death Star. And did the corridor to the consolate ship at the beginning of A New Hope seem to glow VERY pink with all the laser blasts in the SS (special special) edition.
Now that I think of it, the SS edition proves what a Nazi Lucas is.
Why does Lucas do it? He ruined the original Star Wars trilogy once in 1997, and now he’s done it again for the DVD release Admittedly, most of the changes are for the better (relative to the original 1997 hacks), but one thing REALLY gets on my goat.
In the final scene in Return of the Jedi, he replaces the ghost of Anakin Skywalker (played by Sebastian Shaw) with a ghost of Anakin played by Hayden Christensen. This is just STUPID. Anakin died when he was an old man. Kenobi died when he was an old man, yet his ghost remained the same. Yoda has probably looked the same in his 900 years.
I’m not looking forward to this re-re-release, but I need a copy of the movies on DVD and this is my only option. I’d rather have the original editions.
Are there any other artistic industries on the planet other than Hollywood who constantly change their works of art to match current trends?
I just noticed something on the new version of Firefox (my great web browser which cuts down the number of viruses and spyware I get on my Windows computer) and I see there’s an RSS button on the status bar when I’m viewing my blog. I click on the link, click on subscribe, add it to my bookmarks, and suddenly, my links are all available via a bookmark menu.
I can’t wait for Apple to release their next version of Safari which will have the same feature.
If you’re still using the antiquated, insecure browser known as Internet Explorer, then you should do yourself a favour and grab Firefox.
Give or take 39,999,990.
Lists of e-mail based worms, worms spread by webservers, Trojan Horses, Macro viruses for All the MS Office programs, and a list of the most active viruses today should be enough to scare anyone away from using Windows.
I haven’t even begun on spyware, adware, and other nasty programs.
Given all of this, the number of man hours spent fixing these problems, the number of computer systems that are completely brought to their knees when the big worms spread, WHY THE HELL DO PEOPLE STILL USE WINDOWS??????
What is wrong with people?
I’m a Mac user, I’ll admit. But I have a Windows PC, and pre Mac OS-X, I wouldn’t have touched a Mac with someone elses ten foot barge pole. But OS-X is based on UNIX, which makes it stable and secure. Features which are not present on Windows PC’s. The number of apps out there surprises people for some reason. OS-X has no viruses, trojans, and malicious spyware programs.
NONE.
And the Macs are getting pretty damn cheap these days. My 550MHz G4 Powerbook is still running like a dream. In fact, every updated version of the OS that Apple release, it gets FASTER! Unlike Windows where you have to buy more memory and a faster CPU each new release.
If you’re a Windows user, you’re probably looking at the pathetic clock speeds that Macs have compared to PCs. Well, I can safely tell you that my 500MHz laptop runs applications just as fast as my 2.4GHz Celeron PC. And the PC has 1 gig of RAM while my Mac has half that.
If you value your computing experience, then do yourself a favour. Get a Mac. iMacs are dirt cheap now. And they’re G5 CPUs. G5′s are 64 bit processors which means the lowly clock speed can push out even more than they ever could before. Intel and AMD have been making steps in the 64bit CPU arena for a couple of years now, but Windows is slowing them down. Microsoft can’t write a decent 64 bit OS.
If you use a PC on purpose, then go to a Mac shop and try a Mac. If you don’t even try and if you just say they’re too expensive, or too ugly, or too gay, then you’ll always be a loser. All your life. And you’ll always need to have an updated firewall, virus scanner, and at least one spyware remover.
You’ll save money because you won’t have any downtime, you won’t need to upgrade your hardware as often, and you won’t need to replace faulty parts as often.
But having Windows computers on the net is making the lives of those of us with real computers difficult.
There are a bunch of people wanting to convince Microsoft that the next incarnation of the Xbox should be backwards compatible. There is an online petition which has over 21,000 signatures at the time I write this. Sure, this is a lot of people, but the number is miniscule compared tho those who have actually bought Xboxes. Between the 2001 launch and January 2004, the number sold was 13.7 million. Projections then were for 15 to 16 million by June. We’ll be conservative and assume 14 million have been sold. 21,000 people equals (according to someone else who knows maths) 0.15%.
Do they have a hope in hell of succeeding in their holy quest of dragging the next Xbox into the ground with them? I certainly hope not.
The PS2 had backwards compatibilty, sure. But to have backwards compatibility in an architecture which is not inherently compatible, you need to do one of two things:
1. Write an emulator.
2. Include the old hardware in the new box.
Guess what? Neither are free. Both will cost development dollars which will be passed on to the end user.
I bought a PS2 when it first came out. The PS2, a game, and a memory card cost me over NZ$1000. I bought an Xbox and game not long after it came out, and it only cost me about NZ$600.
Any additions to the hardware – such as backwards compatibility – will cost us all in the end. Don’t vote. Don’t encourage this insanity.
Some things have happened and some haven’t since last post. I just sold my Windom today for $1000, and a week ago I bought a BMW 323i. Fire engine red with a nice body kit. Mine is a 1996, so it’s not as ugly as the current model.
Last weekend, Karl came down from auckland and we did a lot of work on the outline for the movie. We were going to spend Saturday and Sunday doing it, but he got too tired after Saturday’s session of about 13 hours. So we played Mashed on Xbox for half of Sunday, then went to visit Phantom.
